Web analytics is the measurement of the behaviors of visitors to a website. In an electronic commerce context, it refers to the measurement of which aspects of an entity's website work towards the business objectives; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase. There are at least two categories of web analytics, off-site and on-site web analytics. Off-site web analytics refers to web measurement and analysis of a website's potential audience, visibility and level of interest in an electronic network, e.g., the Internet, as a whole. Whereas, on-site web analytics refers to analyzing a visitor's journey once on a website, for example, specific landing pages. In on-site web analytics, data is typically analyzed against key performance indicators to improve website performance, increase traffic to a website, etc.
The two main technological approaches for collecting data to be analyzed by on-site web analytics software are the use of log-file analysis, page tagging, or both. The first method, log-file analysis, reads the log-files in which the web server records all of its transactions. The second method, page tagging, uses an embedded software script in a web page to notify a third party server when a page is rendered by a web browser. Both types of approaches collect data that can be processed to produce web traffic reports. Integrating such web analytics approaches into the server is gaining popularity due to increases in need for real-time or near real-time improvements in performance.